WWE Vengeance 2011 Results: Beth Phoenix Beat Eve and What It Means

Beth Phoenix fought off a gusty challenge from Eve Torres and successfully retained her WWE Divas Championship at WWE's Vengeance pay-per-view. It was not easy, and Phoenix will probably be leaving San Antonio with a few scratches and bruises, but it was a fairly memorable title defense for Phoenix. 

Indeed, the champion proved she has just as much chemistry with Eve as she did with Kelly, whom she has also had several decent pay-per-view matches with.    

Indeed, this was a solid, well performed women's match with several stand-out moments, notably, Eve attempting to get Phoenix to tap out with a painful MMA style arm bar, as Beth desperately fought to get to the ropes. There was also a fair amount of trash-talking too; "Come on, cry baby, cry!" taunted Phoenix at several points which, impressively, managed to come off as more dramatic than funny.

More impressively, Phoenix managed to pull out the victory all by herself. Unlike her tainted title victory over Kelly Kelly at Hell in a Cell, in which her "Divas of Doom" tag partner Natalya viciously blasted Kelly with a brutal mic shot, leaving the soon-to-be-ex-champion vulnerable to the GlamSlam, Beth's victory here was clean: She won after capitalizing on a fallen Eve after she missed a moonsault. The lack out of outside involvement was due to angle earlier in the evening in which several heel divas, including Phoenix, took out Kelly backstage, and management, in an attempt to regain order, banned Natalya and Kely from ringside.   

So what does this result mean for Beth's future?  

That her victory was clean shows a decent amount of faith in her from WWE management. While she lost clean twice to Kelly in two pay-per-views in a role and had to resort to cheating to eventually win the Divas Championship, here, she was finally presented as a dominant, aggressive heel who can get the job done. After a few stop-starts (including a deeply embarrassing loss to Kelly in her hometown of Buffalo, New York at WWE's Night of Champions event), WWE brass appear to finally be getting behind the Glamazon and are ready to push her to the moon.  

The promising "Divas of Doom" storyline will also go on, as trained wrestlers Phoenix and Natayla continue to try and take out the models-turned-wrestlers on the WWE roster. The title belt is a much-needed boost for their credibility in this matter, and certainly, taking the title off Beth so soon would have greatly damaged what has turned into one of WWE's best women's storylines in a long time.

Claiming that she and Natalya are vastly superior to the models, Phoenix needs a lengthy title run if this Models vs. Wrestlers angle is to love up to its full potential. Otherwise, she just comes off as a woman who can run her mouth but cannot back up what she says. Indeed, her credibility has already taken a hit thanks to all those clean losses to Kelly.     

Additionally, despite the clean win, I feel the result indicates that Eve will probably demand a rematch with Phoenix for her title and the program between the two will continue.The fact that an obnoxious Beth taunted a fallen Eve after the match was over seems to confirm issues between the two women are far from settled. And after taking on frequent foe Kelly Kelly too many times to count, this would be a fresh feud for Phoenix. It may even produce vastly better in-ring results, too. 

While Kelly work hard, her wrestling skills are still greatly  flawed, and their matches usually suffered for it. Eve, on the other hand, is a far more polished performer. With this in mind, there is no reason Eve and Beth cannot continue to churn out good, maybe even great, matches in the weeks and months to come. 

Rather than being the end of anything, it appears that the Eve vs. Phoenix feud is only just getting started. That's good news for WWE's women division, and good news for fans who are eager to see the direction of WWE's women's division continue to improve and thrive.